Its total carbon footprint, including the artists and spectators’ travel and energy consumption, was likely to have been at least 31,500 tonnes, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com _ more than 3,000 times the average Briton’s annual footprint. One viewer of BBC2’s Newsnight wrote online, “Would you hold a hog roast to promote vegetarianism?”

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If we, to use a phrase conservatives like to throw around, want an event like this to pass the smell test of a cost-benefit analysis, I think Americans have to be reminded of the costs of global warming in words of the old Fram commercials (for those of you old enough to remember):

“You can pay me a little bit now or a whole lot later.”

Or, as Gore said: “You are Live Earth.”

Can we get someone to be just a little more open to the idea of treating this issue seriously now? Can we get an elected official, whether local, state or federal, to do that? That’s the biggie. As for getting someone we know to think and act more environmentally, two things:

One is that this is word-of-mouth marketing. The other, to paraphrase what Robert Redford said, is that environmental activism needs to be about what we can do rather than what we can’t.

That said, I don’t know whether I felt “that old” or “young again” hearing a band like UB40. I liked some of the short film clips a lot, some somewhat, and felt that some were little more than video equivalents of Adbusters magazine.

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The Idea Behind This

Accountability. We have to be accountable, and we think our politicians should be too. We do not want a replay of the craven perfidy of the last 12 years that nearly sunk the ship of state. The administrators of this blog have decided, as a group, that working to elect real Democrats to office at all levels of government is the best way to achieve the restoration of oversight and accountability.

But please! Don’t make the mistake of thinking of us as battered wives who keep coming back for more, because that would be totally wrong. Parole Officers would be much more fitting. (Full Mission Statement here.)